Arthur Kroeber

But when you take account of stuff from China coming in through third countries and so forth, basically that remains the same.

And then if you talk about investment flows, there's $600 billion or more of U.S.

corporate investment in China, which generates huge amounts of sales, much larger than U.S.

exports to China.

So the integration of the two economies is just extraordinary.

There's basically no precedent for it at any point in economic history, and it is just a completely different order of magnitude to what was going on during the Cold War.

So one question would be is like, okay, if you really want a Cold War, does that mean that what you want to do is you want to reduce those trade and investment flows back down to essentially zero?

And if so, how do you do that, right?

So that's a very difficult problem.

But I think you got at sort of the more core conceptual issue, which is how does this end?

This does not end by China going away or turning into something completely different.

It's too big.

It is too successful.

The economic model is successful on its own terms, has a lot of problems, but it's fundamentally successful.

And it is deeply integrated with the entire global economy in ways that are beneficial for China and beneficial for most of the other countries in the world.

So everyone has some sort of a stake in China continuing to succeed.

And so this is just not going to go away.

And the other sense in which it's not going to go away is let's say you could wave a magic wand and make the Communist Party of China disappear tomorrow and replace it with something else.

What would that something else look like?

Well, if that something else were to be successful at governing China –